The Strategy Paradox and WebInno

I’ve been running around like crazy with back-to-back events after work. Yesterday was a meetup for author Michael Raynor, author of The Strategy Paradox, a successor to the Innovator’s Dilemma. It was a great event over at Vintage on Broad Street, a place worth checking out. I had a laugh, I used to have to wear a suit every day and have recently taken it for granted until I saw the folks from Deloitte that were there.

I have yet to dig into the book, but had a chance to chat with the author and he explained the premise: While the Innovator’s Dilemma explains how proper management actually defeats an organization’s ability to innovate, there is a similar phenomenon in strategic planning where the strategies that would appear most likely to be a runaway success are the same ones that can be complete failures. In the middle are lower risk strategies that have a high probability of meager returns (please keep in mind that these are my words based on about 10 minutes of discussion).

Our chat has been captured in glorious stereomonic and will be included in this Monday’s M Show, so please take a listen.

Tonight was WebInno number 11. The event continues to be a huge success, they must be pushing 300 attendees now. Although Mara’s asking me if I was going to Nantucket nearly drove me to tears (that’s another story), I did persevere long enough to check out the latest:

• Virtual Ubiquity has a rocking web-based word processor with some very cool features that Word should be embarrassed by. My concern with this one is that I do most of my writing offline, but they did say that they have (or will have) the ability to work offline.
• Cardvio is on demand printing of customized greeting cards. I really liked these guys because it’s a good example of picking off a vertical. There are many companies doing on demand print, but by making themselves the best in a very focused area hopefully that will give them the runway they need to expand.
• MyDesignIn has a basic online CAD system so consumers can design the home improvement projects they want to do. They have some great integration that can grab product vendor’s website to include in the plans. The demo showed the user going to Kohler’s website and selecting a sink and adding it to the plan. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get to their site today but they were at Demo you can see MyDesignIn there. I also found a review from Brandon Watts who was enjoying martial bliss at last check.

Strong presentations across the board. In closing I have to congratulate Christopher Penn as tomorrow he will be rolling the 500th episode of The Financial Aid Podcast.